Michal Copiuk is the Chief Operating Officer of X Open Hub, a multi-asset Liquidity and trading technology provider for financial institutions and retail brokerages. Finance Magnates interviewed Copiuk to understand the firm's reasons for becoming a cryptocurrency liquidity provider.
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What is your opinion about the cryptocurrency market?
Despite the increasing popularity and publicity it enjoys, not many people yet know how to trade with Cryptocurrencies . A lot of investors are not feeling comfortable with the technology needed to store bitcoins and other altcoins. As various statistics show there is still some lack of trustworthiness in the technology used to store clients’ coins, no matter if those are virtual wallets or hard wallets.
Clients are also afraid of the security of their fiat money, as many of the available exchanges are not regulated.
We very well know the history of the top crypto exchanges that have failed to deliver necessary level of security for their clients. What is more, even today many of them have some technical problems, either with API or quoting one of the several instruments from their portfolio.
Also, many exchanges do not accept fiat money. Clients have to buy Tether to transfer the funds to the exchange, so the process is time and cost consuming. Moreover, a lot of retail clients are not satisfied with the time it takes to execute a transfer of their virtual currency as well as receive a confirmation of such transfer.
Of course, a lot is being done to achieve improvements. Solutions like SegWit2x or increasing the capacity of the individual blocks are being introduced, but the whole network is still growing and it will take some time to implement those changes.
Therefore, a lot of clients willing to invest or speculate on bitcoin and other altcoins are looking for the alternatives, especially that they would like to have those products leveraged with the most competitive spreads aggregated from many exchanges.
What was the main driving force behind your decision to add cryptocurrencies to your offering?
We are not afraid of the new. We want our customers to have access to novelties, and we want to guarantee them, that if they stay with us, they’ll find everything that will keep their business innovative and agile. That’s the reason why we have decided to introduce this new asset class to our liquidity offer.
What are the advantages of your products?
During the last several weeks we have established connections to the top cryptocurrency exchanges. We have optimized the feeds, spreads and the execution. We have secured ourselves and our clients with in-house developed technologies against any flash crashes or technical problems in any of the venues.
What is more, we are able to offer liquidity for cryptocurrencies starting from 5% margin.
Lastly, in comparison to many unregulated exchanges offering cryptocurrencies, our offer can be fully trusted. Our capital group is regulated by FCA, KNF, Cysec and IFS and our licenses are passported to more than 10 EU countries and our group is listed on Warsaw Stock Exchange.
What’s the added value for your clients?
This is a great possibility for our partners to entice their retail customers to this type of investment, by offering them fair spreads, fast execution and wide range of instruments. We believe that the brokers have to follow the latest trends, and thus they should treat cryptocurrencies as a fantastic tool to acquire more customers or retain the existing ones, by facilitating their trading with bitcoin and other altcoins.
Are there any possible technical obstacles for your clients to get access to cryptocurrencies?
Not at all. Integration with our liquidity pool can be conducted within 24 hours. We offer API, FIX, MT4 GW and other in-house developed connection methods. Also, our hedge accounts can be handled in multiple currencies.
What is your next step?
In terms of short term plans, being aware that as every trading product, this one is also developing and evolving very fast and new cryptocurrencies emerge on the market, we constantly expand our offer. In fact we have already scheduled adding new cryptocurrencies to our portfolio.
In a long term, however, we are aiming to be the top Liquidity Provider for Cryptocurrencies in the world.
